Ever The Hero (Book 1): Ever The Hero

by Harn, Darby

“They’re trapped, like,” she says. “You don’t see it. All these lines. You’re trapped in here. I’ve got to let you out.”

  “Ma, please.”

  The cloudiness in Ma’s eyes clears a bit. She looks around the room, as if suddenly conscious of where she is. This happens every so often. A break in the fog. A spark in the line. She hugs me. She never hugs me. I freeze. Ma burns. Her skin on fire. Hair damp with sweat. Red strands stick to my cheek, molten steel and then she releases me, hard, like she’s pulling a cord. She rips away, receding into the dark of the apartment.

  A message buzzes on my PEAL, with the distinctive ping that I assigned to the number that GP bloke gave me. My heart skips as I swipe across the screen to the latest message.

  The roof. Tonight.

  If I’m not out scavenging the ruins, I’m usually on the roof. In the apartment, I can never breathe. Who am I kidding. No matter where I am, I’m always holding my breath. The vertex of the Halfway Hotel, an old flatiron carved out of the point where Harrison, Delaney and Shelley converge, becomes the prow of a lifeboat, adrift in a dark sea. I look up, as I always do. Most nights, all those points of light seem perforations in a veil, draped over my cage. With Valene’s message still buzzing on my hand, I imagine they might be the glint in her eyes.

  I think I might puke.

  Don’t puke. Don’t be weird. Just be yourself. No. Don’t be yourself. I’m fucking this up already. What exactly am I fucking up? I hope the blouse is good enough; the perfume isn’t too much. Anxiety riddles through my hands. I don’t know what’s happening, or what could happen, for the first time in longer than I can remember. It’s fucking exhilarating.

  The door creaks shut behind her. “You smell good.”

  I knew Valene’s voice even before I met her, refined sunlight shining through the clouds of all of her interviews. This voice is sharper; colder; decidedly less luminous.

  A woman steps out of the dark behind me, blonde hair drawn back tight into a thin dagger. “Frankie Fleet, NOW News. Sorry, I had to get a bit creative. You don’t answer my calls. You’re hacked by the way. FYI, maybe don’t take any more nude selfies.”

  I cover my PEAL with my hand. “What?”

  “Kitsie – can I call you Kitsie? – I have some questions for you. Won’t take a sec.”

  “My name’s Kit.”

  Frankie trails along the edge of the roof. “Kitsie, what were you doing out in the ruins the other night?”

  Everything spins around me. Frankie sent the text; Valene isn’t coming; my PEAL is hacked.

  “How do you know…”

  “I interviewed a woman at Break Pointe Trust who said this girl from across the river saved her. She described you, and you know, over here in the ruins, it’s easy to find diamonds.”

  “I have to go,” I say, heading back to the door.

  “It would be embarrassing if it came out you were out there scavenging for alien tech. But not as much as if it would be for GP if it came out that you were the real hero at the bank.”

  I look back. “What?”

  That old anxiety triggers in me. The only reliable spark I can ignite. Someone knows; no one can know. I don’t remember when I first realized I was gay, but I remember vividly the moment when I was afraid someone else would. My freshman year, I fell in with Teresa Burke, a girl who wore dresses only when she had scabbed knees. I never wore my bruises. Never showed my scars. I wore my hair in a knot and tried very hard not to be different. Gym was terrible. Swimming worse. I sat with Teresa poolside one day, counting the minutes until the bell rang. I lingered on the beads of water hugging her every curve, and Tamika Moorehouse climbed out of the pool in front of us.

  Her voice carried. You all is nasty.

  It was one thing to be black – Or are you white? What are you exactly? – but I couldn’t be gay. Not back then. All that self-suppressing confusion, that anxiety of being discovered and labeled and sequestered comes flooding back now at the thought of this Frankie knowing everything about me. Piecing me together. Connecting all the dots I’ve never been able to.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I can’t talk to reporters.”

  “You didn’t have to sign the NDA. You don’t work for Great Power. But you probably thought, I’ll play ball, and she’ll invite me over to the tower. But she hasn’t, has she?”

  That’s the worst part. I didn’t want anything. I didn’t expect anything. But I hoped. What was I hoping for?

  “Lucky me, I’ve got you for a consolation prize,” I say.

  Frankie smiles, all sweet, as she applies some lip balm. “You’re quick. I like that. Valene is quick, too. You probably thought you were signing that NDA for whatever that was the other night down at the wall. But it actually covers any and every interaction you have with Great Power, which just so happens to include that business at the bank.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  Frankie smacks her lips. “The last thing they want when they’re twisting the city’s arm for money is someone showing up and doing their job for free. You actually think Valene Blackwood gives a damn about what some random in The Derelicts is doing down at the wall? She wouldn’t stop a bank robbery.”

  The bottom falls out of me. I thought my dreams were coming true. “She was… Valene was conducting tests of her sonic abilities when she encountered unexpected turbulence.”

  Frankie politely claps. “Word for word. Good job.”

  I bite my lip. “What do you want?”

  She gazes across the river, at the Blackwood Building. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Kind of like her. Gleaming. Impossible. But it casts this really long shadow across the city late in the day. It’s getting pretty late, Kitsie. This standoff with the city, it’s going on months. Break Pointe can’t pay, so it will just go on until something happens. You think that’s fair?”

  “I can’t do anything about it,” I say.

  “You can get close to Valene.”

  I shake my head. “What?”

  “Call her. Tell her you’re getting offers for money to go on the news and you don’t know what to do. She’ll send the lawyers, but insist on talking only to her. When she invites you over, try and get something. An email. Memo. Something.”

  “I won’t do that,” I say.

  Frankie smiles. “Valene doesn’t care about you. I seriously doubt she even remembers you. Why protect her?”

  I can’t, Valene said, her anguish real. Her pain. “I made a promise,” I say. “I’m going in now.”

  “I don’t get you. Anyone else would have run the other way at the bank. They would have been justified.”

  “They would have been wrong.”

  “What obligation did you have? What do you owe Valene?”

  “The same as I owe anyone else,” I say.

  Her eyes fix on me. Sharp as scalpels. She’s carving me up. Judging me. Appraising me, not for who I am, but what I can be.

  “You’re for real, aren’t you?” she says.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Frankie hands me her business card. “I’ll tell you a secret. You can be as real as they come. Doesn’t matter. What matters is what people believe. That’s the real power, Kitsie. Not strength, or flying, or invisibility. Information.”

  The edge of the card cuts into my palm. Frankie walks past me, a leering smile on her lips and though the stars glimmer with promise, I feel more trapped than ever.

  Ba-dumm.

  Birds at the window. Ma through the apartment. Fist on the door. I don’t want to answer. Who will it be? Another reporter? The landlord? It’s the giant guy from GP again. Brilliant.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  “But I didn’t say anything.”

  “Now.”

  Birds swarm the living room window. A million thoughts swarm my head. I didn’t say anything. Did I? What about Ma? I won’t be gone that long. I hope. She’ll be fine.

  This is all going to be fine.

  A small delta-win
ged skimmer docks with the mooring mast of the Blackwood Building as I arrive. No idea what the shuttle would be doing at the tower. After the secondary invasion by the alien never materialized, the Earth Defense Force disbanded and GP bought the fleet out to support their own space initiatives, but beyond the space station Laputa, it’s really not what you would have expected. We’ve been to the moon and Mars for a minute, but it’s like the attack left us skittish of space.

  Break Pointe vanishes beneath popcorn clouds as the elevator rises. The car stops, and the doors open to the penthouse Valene calls home. Gray, grooved foam cushions all the furniture and appliances. The walls checkerboard. Foam slats serrate the ceiling. Even the glass of the windows, when you get up close, is molded in an irregular, baffled texture. Once you get past the holy shit of it all, it’s really a padded cell.

  Her voice is a whisper, light and weak, but I hear it as if Valene is right behind me, her lips to my ear.

  In here.

  A padded dome rises out of the floor in the epicenter of the penthouse. The dome slides back with a hush. Valene rests inside the egg-like chamber, curled up in a tiny ball.

  “Valene?”

  She reaches for me. “Come in. It’s ok.”

  I set my jacket down as lightly as I can, and ease into the chamber. The dome murmurs shut, sealing us in. I rest on the mattress beside Valene, confused, terrified, but Valene holds tight to my hand. She holds sure, like we’re old friends.

  “I meant to call you, Kitsie.”

  She speaks haltingly, as if she’s afraid of her own sound. She possesses none of the confidence of someone of her power; she’s shy. Uncertain. I understand, or at least recognize, the diffidence. I don’t know how to be with people. Conversations require too much focus and energy, all of which have to progress through connections I simply don’t have. It’s not as simple as knowing what parts you’re missing. Sparkplugs or synapses, it doesn’t matter; you either have that fire, or you don’t.

  “Call me Kit,” I say.

  “Your friends do?”

  “I don’t have many friends. Actually, I don’t have any.”

  She caresses my cheek. When she touches me, my heart threatens to shut down. Too much power to process.

  “Neither do I,” she says, voice like a ghost. “But I’m not lonely. I hear everyone.” Valene touches her ears. I want to touch them. I want to touch her, and my want misfires, into this desperate need to get out of here. My hands shake. My skin sweats and I’m slick in her hand. “All the time. Since I was a baby, all I’ve known is this constant thunder of voices.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize…”

  Her fingers touch my lips, my hurt, as if to mum them. “No one does. I have money, power and privilege. I have everything I could want, except peace. I’ve never had any peace.”

  I don’t know what to say. She pinches her lips, like she shouldn’t have said anything, and certainly not anymore. I don’t know. I touch her fingers. Her lips. I kiss her. My heart pounds in my chest and the beat swells between us, this pressure I can’t release. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe.

  Her tongue curls with mine. Her lips stick to mine and she giggles, she licks us apart and then bites me back. Those connections don’t always work, but there’s still a spark. Somewhere within me, I still feel the ghost of fire.

  “Valene…”

  “Shh.”

  “I didn’t say anything to anyone.”

  “I know,” she says, and tugs on her ear.

  “You heard?” Of course she did. “Valene… is it true? You had me sign the NDA to keep me from talking about the bank?”

  She cups her ears. “Everyone should know what you did. Everyone should know the truth. You should know, Kit.” She kisses me soft. “I wanted to see you. Before I left.”

  “You’re leaving? For where – ”

  The skimmer. The space station. Why – there’s no sound. Valene is leaving Earth to go where sound can’t follow her.

  “My powers are growing out of control.” She winces, like it hurts just to say it. “It’s not just putting in earplugs or soundproofing the residence or my clothes or the limos. My whole body is an aural receiver. I can’t take it. I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “The doctors say there’s no stopping it.”

  Something like fear grips me. “How long do you have?”

  She tries to smile again, but it doesn’t take. “This last run was meant to be indefinite. My father wanted to wait until we found out what caused the crash, but I can’t wait any longer. I have to leave, Kitsie. And I may never come back.”

  Three

  “Come with me,” Valene says again, her words breaking like the dawn outside the windows of the residence.

  I tie the sash on a silk robe I pulled out of her closet. One of her closets. Both bigger than my apartment. She’s got loads of clothes in there, most of them still in sacks and bags sent over from all the designer labels and I’m not thinking about what she said. I’m making tea in the kitchen on a burner cushioned against sound and I’m avoiding the problem. This is what I always do. Go to the roof. Out on the bike. Run through my head. That way I don’t have to face what’s back at home.

  “I can’t leave my mom,” I say.

  Valene stretches out across the mattress inside the open deprivation chamber. In the pictures of her in the app, she’s this Amazon. It’s like movie-poster art. That isn’t really her. The pictures accentuate her physique, her lines and her curves but Valene doesn’t really have muscles. She doesn’t really have any breasts, either, though they’re lovely and the tea is done, but the pot doesn’t whistle. Nothing in the residence makes a sound, except for me, dithering about in the TV glow of dawn.

  “Whatever she needs, I’ll see to it,” Valene says.

  “Well. She needs a lot. It’s… complicated.”

  “Whatever she needs.”

  That wouldn’t be the end of the world. Ma would have – well, her medicine at least. And I’d have Valene Blackwood to experiment on in the field of zero gravity sex. Somewhere I took a turn in the ruins. Things have been unlikely since.

  I pour us each a cup of tea. “You take all the girls you’ve just met up to your private space station?”

  “Only you.”

  “What’s so special about me?”

  “You’re this kind of wine color,” Valene says.

  “Color?”

  Her eyes furrow. “I hear sound, but I see color. Shapes. I don’t know how to explain it. Some people are blue. Orange. You’re lightning. Pure. Powerful. Brilliant. It’s all around you, Kitty. There are these little amaranth feelers coming off the bolt. They’re branching through the air, and then you stop talking and it’s as if one of them finds the ground. All of those trails fill with light in a flash. Lightning.”

  I close my eyes, and imagine wine-colored lightning cracking between us. Tendrils of energy phase through our bodies, connecting us, binding us, in a moment of electric joy.

  I swallow. “You’re too kind.”

  “And you’re too modest.”

  Her smile warms me more than the sun. “And this would be ok? A complete stranger flying up to space to live with you?”

  “I tend to get what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you,” she says, smiling at my embarrassment. “I want to not be lonely. There isn’t anything wrong with that, is there? So instead of Vegas, we run off to low Earth orbit.”

  Porcelain doesn’t clink. Spoons don’t rattle. Nothing stirs as I set the tray down on the mattress and lie with her. I caress a strand of her hair out of her smiling eyes.

  “What about the city?” I say. “What about the people?”

  The lazy smile she’s worn all night fades in the light of day. Valene touches her PEAL, and the dome of the deprivation chamber slides back overhead, sealing us off from the outside.

  “If it were up to me, things would b
e different,” she says. “But it’s not. And I can’t shape a world I’m not in.”

  “Isn’t your father like the smartest person alive? Is he working on a solution to your problem?”

  She looks away. “This is the solution.”

  “I’m smart. I could help.”

  “Now I’m in trouble,” she says. “She’s cute and smart.”

  “You have no idea.”

  If she knows I’ve talked with Frankie, and said other things under my breath in the dark while I thought of Valene, she probably knows what I do and where I go. Goes without saying. All of this does, but I want to say. For the first time in a long time, I want to open up to someone. For the first time since Dad. Anywhere we went, he knew someone. Even when we were down and out, and he was scrapping like everyone else, he was happy to see you. There was no filter on him. He just was.

  Some of us don’t make connections easily. We have the engine, but not the spark. Those connections don’t fire. You look around, and see familiar faces. You know their names. What they do. But you don’t know them. And they don’t know you. Around Dad, you made those connections. You fired. And that was his greatest gift. Connecting. Patching. Kit bashing people, places, things, into something more than they were.

  “That’s what he called me,” I say. “Kit Bash.”

  Valene brushes my cheek. “Who?”

  “My Dad. We scrapped together. Scavenged. He took me everywhere. He taught me everything. How things work. I don’t think I work, though. Or not the way I’m supposed to.”

  She kisses my cheek. “What happened to him?”

  I stir my tea. “He died. Cancer. I was nine.”

  “It never gets better, does it?”

  I don’t think about it. I don’t have time, not with Ma, not with everyday the last eighteen years being the same rolling the rock back up the mountain of her illness and our poverty.

  “My mother died,” Valene says. “When I was five.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “She shielded me from… everything. I didn’t know what I was. Who we were. My father and his generation, they became Empowered. I was born this way. And that terrified people. I didn’t know that, until Molly Swift tried to kidnap me. People tried to… I was raised with all this fear.”